LOG­ITECH K380

At just RM149, the Log­itech K380 is by far the most af­ford­able key­board in our shootout. It’s also the heav­i­est, weigh­ing in at 423g with its bat­ter­ies in­stalled. The key­board is made en­tirely of gray plas­tic and mea­sures 279 x 124 x 16 mm. It has a slop­ing pro­file, which gives it a com­fort­able typ­ing an­gle. The key­board is pow­ered by two pre-in­stalled AAA bat­ter­ies, which Log­itech says will last two years as­sum­ing daily heavy-us­age (de­fined as eight hours a day), which is pretty fan­tas­tic. Stan­dard bat­ter­ies also means that you can eas­ily re­place them if the key­board dies on the go. There’s a power switch on the left side of the key­board.

Pair­ing a de­vice is as sim­ple as hold­ing down one of the three yel­low but­tons on the key­board un­til its light starts blink­ing. Then just pair to your de­vice like any other Blue­tooth key­board. You can do this for three de­vices and it’s quick and easy to switch be­tween de­vices by press­ing its cor­re­spond­ing but­ton. The keys are la­beled with both Ap­ple and Win­dows/An­droid func­tions, and the key­board will au­to­mat­i­cally sense the plat­form it’s paired with and switch the keys to suit.

Rather than the more con­ven­tional square keys, the K380 has rounded chi­clet-type keys. The keys aren’t re­ally harder to type on, but they do feel dif­fer­ent. Round keys can ac­tu­ally re­sult in fewer mistypes, as there’s more space be­tween each key, so you won’t ac­ci­den­tally hit the key next to the one you were aim­ing for. Typ­ing on the K380 is com­fort­able, thanks to the el­e­vated typ­ing an­gle, and the keys them­selves feel firm with a de­cent amount of travel for a por­ta­ble key­board.

There’s also some added func­tion­al­ity for mo­bile de­vices, as the F4 to F7 keys double up as home, re­cent apps, menu, and back on an An­droid de­vice, and also share some func­tion­al­ity for other OSes. For ex­am­ple, the menu key opens up the right-click menu on a Win­dows de­vice. You also get a full set of me­dia con­trol keys on F8 to Insert.